2002 - September - Coalition collapses. Vice Chancellor and Freedom Party leader Riess-Passer and two Freedom Party ministers resign in row with Joerg Haider, widely seen as part of power struggle within party.

2003 October - Package of asylum laws introduced, widely seen as among the most restrictive in Europe.

2004 April - Heinz Fischer elected president.

2005 April - Freedom Party splits as Joerg Haider announces he is leaving to set up Alliance for the Future of Austria.

2005 May - Parliament ratifies the EU constitution.

2005 August - Floods cause devastation as the Danube river bursts its banks.

2006 February - A Vienna court finds British historian David Irving guilty of Holocaust denial and sentences him to three years in prison. He is released in December 2006. The case sparks a national debate about the denial legislation.

2006 April - Rising water levels in the Danube again cause severe flooding.

2006 October - The Social Democrats led by Alfred Gusenbauer narrowly defeat the ruling conservative People's Party in elections. After weeks of bargaining, the two parties agree on a coalition. The government is inaugurated in January 2007.

Jews remembered

2007 September - Pope Benedict XVI makes 'pilgrimage' to Austria where he had spent time in his youth.

National soul-searching

2008 April - National outrage and soul-searching at case of Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered children with her. Tougher law on sexual abuse planned.

2008 July - The centre-right People's Party withdraws from grand coalition with Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer's Social Democrats, forcing a snap general election.

2008 September - The Social Democrats again emerge as largest party in the general election, but both it and the People's Party suffer heavy losses while resurgent far-right parties take 29%.

2008 October - The leader of the far-right Alliance for the Future of Austria, Joerg Haider, is killed in a car crash.

2008 December - New coalition government made up of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPO) and the conservative People's Party is sworn in, two months after snap elections. SPO leader Werner Faymann becomes chancellor.

2010 April - President Fischer is re-elected.

2010 October - Far-right Freedom Party wins 26% of vote in municipal elections in Vienna, putting it in second place to Social Democrats.

2011 July - Otto von Habsburg - eldest son of the last Austrian emperor - is buried in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna amid much of the pomp associated with the days of the empire.

2013 June - Austria withdraws troops from the Golan Heights after nearly 40 years of monitoring a UN buffer zone between Israel and Syria, as violence from Syria's civil war spreads.

2013 September - Parliamentary elections. The governing coalition parties win enough votes to form a new government.

Energy security

2014 June - A deal is signed to complete the Austrian section of the South Stream gas pipeline for transporting Russian gas to Europe - bypassing the long-standing transit route through Ukraine - despite calls by the EU for its member states to unite against the project.

2014 December - Russia scraps the South Stream gas pipeline construction project following the imposition of European sanctions in response to its annexation of Crimea.

2015 February - Parliament approves controversial reform to 1912 law which made Islam an official religion in Austria. The revised law gives Muslims more legal security but bans foreign funding for mosques and imams.